1. Field of Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to video systems, and more specifically to allocation of available bits to represent different portions of video frames captured in a sequence.
2. Related Art
A video frame generally refers to digital representation of an image captured using appropriate image capture device. A video frame typically contains multiple pixel values, with each pixel value representing a point or a small portion of the captured image. A sequence of images are often generated by image capture devices (IMDs) such as a video camera. In general, a user points an IMD to a scene (or area) and captures a sequence of images of the scene. The images can be transmitted externally (e.g., in the case of broadcasting equipment or video conferencing equipment) or stored in an appropriate non-volatile memory.
There is often a need to limit the number of bits used to represent video frames. For example when transmitting the video frames on a transmission path, assuming a certain number of frames need to be transmitted in each time unit, the number of bits used to represent the video frames would be limited by the bandwidth constraint of the transmission path, as is well known in the relevant arts. As such, various processing techniques may be used to minimize the number of data bits that need to be transmitted on the path.
Such number of available bits may need to be further shared to represent different portions of image. For example, H.264 standard described in further detail in a document entitled, “Information technology—Coding of audio-visual objects—Part 10: Advanced Video Coding”, available from ISO/IEC (International Standards Organization/lnternational Electrotechnical Commission), contemplates sending a difference of each current frame from a previous frame, while permitting the difference data in different slices (containing a set of macro-blocks, with each macro-block containing multiple pixels) to be encoded at different quantization levels.
Various aspects of present invention provide techniques to allocate an available number of bits to different portions of a video frames.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.